Did my fears make him into the man I feared?

[From my diary]July 23d 2024Of course, I saw signs already at the beginning of our relationship. Or maybe I thought I was seeing them: the so-called red flags. And then you do not know where the truth is, and where your fears, clichés, inferiority complexes take over … Like, once he was driving out of a gas station, and a teenage girl almost bumped into our car, because she was busy impressing her friends with her walk. My husband screamed at her very rudely.I thought back then: “He will be screaming at me like this one day”. He did. But did I make him to?The near-miss at the gas station was a genuine fright — a driver feels that jolt, and some anger is part of the fear. Indeed, the teenager stepped into the path of a moving car. But the driver did not just brake, swear once, and drive on shaken. He screamed at her viciously, at a stranger he would never see again, who had no history with him and expected nothing of him. My fear did not conjure that. It was an early, accurate look at what he does when something crosses him, long before it was me.Red flags or my own fear?Early in a relationship, a real warning sign and plain anxiety can feel exactly the same. I had fears, and an inferiority complex I had been carrying long before I met my ex husband. Always prepared for the worst, I found evidence of bad things coming everywhere, and I stopped trusting my own eyes. Often I could not tell whether I was seeing something being wrong with him or was it my distorted perception, imposed by something from my past onto our shared present and future.Illustration provided by Supportive StrangerSuch confusions are an honest problem. A warning and a worry feel identical, and back then, sitting in the passenger seat, I could not decide which it was.Legitimate surge, but illegitimate mannerThe girl walked into the path of a moving car because she was watching her friends instead of the road. That is a real danger and a real fright. If he had hit her, he would have been the one questioned and maybe charged, however careless she had been, because that is how it falls on drivers, and it is its own kind of unfair. Fear ran through that moment, and anger is part of fear. Most people would have felt something sharp. So there is no need to argue that this was a man abusing an innocent for no reason.Illustration provided by Supportive StrangerWhat struck me is not that he got angry, but how. The fright explains the surge. It does not explain — and less excuse — the manner.But was such a short situation enough for an honest judgement at all?Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal spent years measuring how much a person reveals in a few seconds. In a 1992 review of dozens of studies, they found that people shown very short video clips — often under a minute, sometimes seconds — judged a stranger’s character about as accurately as people who had watched far longer. Thin slices, they called them. My gut took a thin slice at that gas station. It did not read “he yelled when frightened,” which anyone might do. It read the rudeness and the disproportion, and it made a prediction: that will be me one day.Did I make him into a rude man?He did, in the end, scream at me during our fights the way he screamed at that girl. After the divorce, I wondered whether I had summoned it — whether expecting it, bracing for it, flinching in advance, invited him into being the worse version of himself.The self-fulfilling prophecy has been studied — among others — by the sociologist Robert Merton back in 1948. A belief about a situation can change how a person behaves, and that behavior can make the belief come true. Expect the worst of someone often enough, and you can sometimes help draw it out.The fine-grained “how does one person draw the feared behavior out of another” was demonstrated by later researchers. Applied to a marriage, the relationship version is Downey and colleagues’ work on rejection sensitivity from 1998: people who anxiously expect rejection tend to behave more defensively or negatively in a conflict, which pulls a colder or angrier response from their counterpart. Same shape — the fear steers your conduct, and your conduct shapes theirs: less warmth, more nervousness, worse performance, a chillier or more conflictual exchange.However, it has never been shown to manufacture a partner’s rage or cruelty. There is a real distinction between behaving in ways that draw out coldness and being the cause of another adult’s screaming.Set the two of us — me and the girl — beside each other. I carried the prophecy for years. I had watched him at that gas station, made my quiet prediction, and lived with it the whole time, half-braced, waiting. The girl carried nothing. She had known him for the length of one near-miss. She had no fear of him, no theory about him, nothing to fulfil. Whatever I carried changed nothing about how he behaved.What it doesn’t meanEven with all of that laid out, I kept blaming myself. Self-blame is very tempting. If I made him scream, then I had a hand on it. I could have been warmer, or calmer, or less afraid, and he would have softened, and the marriage becomes something I could have steered. That “realization” first feels painful, but in fact, it is a comforting one, because the other option is even worse: that I had almost no power at all, that his behaviour was his and ran on its own logic, and that no change in my behaviour, however good, would have changed the outcome.Illustration provided by Supportive StrangerThe correct realization takes the agency away from me at all, which is scary; that’s why I was reluctant to see it.A lot of people who have been badly treated invent the same explanation. We would rather be at fault than be helpless, because being at fault at least means being in charge of something.I write these reflections while building Supportive Stranger, a small iOS app for journaling through difficult moments.Thanks for reading Divorced me! Subscribe to receive new posts and support my work.This blog and podcast exist for educational purposes. To make the content more substantial and grounded in real research, I use AI tools for finding quotes and polishing the written style. The podcast episodes are spoken by myself. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit divorcedme.substack.com